How to Put More “Character” into Your NPCs

Or the play style section in chapter 1, which is about how different people play for different reasons, and you should get to know whether which of your players are looking for hack and slash, versus immersive storytelling. That's even more important in other kinds of games than it is in D&D!

I haven't actually played D&D in a long time, but it's been very useful for me in other very different kinds of games, and even fiction writing. I'd recommend you take another look.

One example I'll shill is Erika Chappell's recent Flying Circus, which is about being a mercenary pilot in a postapocalyptic, Ghibli-esque world. It's quite good, and if I remember correctly, an airplane designer helped with a couple bits of the design.

https://opensketch.itch.io/flying-circus https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/310013

It depends, there are players that love learning all the lore details, the good games add additional dialog or letters/books/emails that are optional so players that are in a rush can skip them.

Heh, I'm admittedly in the minority here, but this is part of morrowind's charm to me. No voice acting so they could have huge rich amounts of text. But I was a kid with infinitely more spare time then :-\

I generally agree and I don't like it either, except for Planescape Torment, because it has awesome characters and text.

> With the possible exception of visual novels

I never did understand visual novels. They aren't games, but they aren't good novels either. Plus I don't read Japanese, and judging by the (poor) translations out there, most "visual novels" consist of mostly pressing enter to skip tons of "..." dialogue.

But then again, after that super short text, there is 10 minutes long cut scene followed by another cut scene.

http://theunstore.com/index.php/unstore/game/49

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-play-unsaf...

Then the game can be so interpretive and improvisational that it actually comes out the other side as less immersive than a crunchier game like D&D. Players spend less time role-playing and more time talmudically studying their character sheets for ways they can apply their aspects to a given situation.

In contrast, I’m a big fan of old(ish) school Call of Cthulhu (from Chaosium, not the d20 version). The mechanics are concrete, straightforward, and get the hell out of the way when you don’t need them. Character sheets embed a lot of info about who a character is without turning into a script for role-playing.

Obviously mileage will vary. Some groups will really grok Fate and love it; mine didn’t. Regardless of whether you even wind up playing the game, it’s a good read for any DM just for its take on things.

Edit to add: I’ve also used Fate’s character creation system to help make characters for short stories, and it worked really well. I’d never do that with something like a D&D character sheet.

Part of the joy of games is agreement on the parameters of what is and is not in bounds for the game. Knowing that boundary lets you focus on only the things within that while pleasantly mentally unloading all of the myriad messy things outside.

Even though each videogame is different, there is a surrounding videogame metagame culture that players tacitly assume defines what all videogames are allowed to do. When learning a new videogame, players assume the rules of that metagame still hold true. (This is one of the reasons videogames today can be so difficult for non-gamers to get into: they don't have this absorbed culture.)

One of the rules of that metagame is "NPCs do not mislead the player." (Other rules of the metagame are: "Your savefile cannot get into a state that makes it impossible to beat the game," and "It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed.")

It's valid for a game to break that meta-rule, but it will be very unpleasantly surprising if they believe they are playing the stock videogame metagame as they learn this game's rules.

This is kind of unfortunate because there's a whole giant space of possible videogames that could be made with interesting rules if only you could set the expectation for players that this game steps outside of typical game culture meta rules. You occasionally see experimental games that do this like Lose/Lose, which deletes random files off your hard drive when you lose (!).

E.g. if one villager said the mirror is in the swamp, unlucky players might waste a lot of time in the swamp, which is bad. But saying it's an axe vs a sword vs a piece of armor vs a potion probably doesn't matter much - whatever it is, as long as it is what is required to defeat the dragon, it's fine.

The key distinction being that the purpose of knowing their wants/fears is to know how they should respond as unforeseen events unfold. Real RPGs have unforeseen events. Video games have branching, but highly deterministic, events - therefore, the "NPC" just needs a set of scripts that cover those branches. You don't need to predict anything. They don't need to be characters in the way that RPG characters are characters; they need to be characters the way that fiction characters are characters.

The old sharecropping farmer may fear his landlord squeezing his finances in the fall.

The greedy merchant may fear that her husband is pissing away too much money on drink.

The cobbler's apprentice may fear his boss, because his boss is a huge, sometimes violent asshole.

These fears can add background flavour through worldbuilding, that make these characters memorable. Nobody cares about, or remembers generic merchant #2 in Bumtown, Nowhere, but they may remember if their first introduction to her is walking in to a family fight about liquor.

Even if the players never explicitly discover that fear, this grounds your design of the characters into something more interesting than "He's a farmer, she's a merchant, he's an apprentice."

When the mayor of a town has been killed 500 times maybe the townspeople should be deeply xenophobic. Maybe the shops stop selling weapons, etc.

Pardon the tangent, but this was particularly blatant in World of Warcraft. Because of the quests, you basically spend half your time committing genocide (wiping out some species or group). For some quest lines you have to murder your way into a place and then murder your way out of it. The irony of this is that the quests turn rogues into the least murderous class in the game, by far. They are the only ones that can reliably sneak in and out instead of murdering bystanders. This is disturbingly backward.

The other irony is that many of the main storylines are about preventing genocide. If a genocidal maniac goes around killing all the other genocidal maniacs, is it because they are good or because they are eliminating the competition?

Its about creating deep, relatable (or, at least: understandable) characters, that make the world feel more alive and not just a dull response dispenser.

Most Bethesda games have amazing NPC's, and the lack of them is exactly what made Fallout 76 so unappealing to me.

Those videos are hilarious though.

Most often people call these soulslikes. Kind of a dumb name and it might artificially constrain new entries to fit into a Dark Souls shaped hole (for example all these games don't have to have basically the same minimalistic light vs dark story) but well, that's how we talked about doomslike for a while as well.

Not sure what other descriptive we could use, intentional games ? The combat being more focused on giving weight to your actions vs allowing you to interrupt and change course anytime is the biggest differentiator IMO.

GMTK made a great video on what this genra by the way : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx7BWayWu08

There's a point at which you get to join the monastery in Sasau and I'll be honest, I just stayed there for ages going about my daily duties because it seemed like an okay life, translating illuminated manuscripts and such.

Also all of them have "chase" and "flee" modes.